Steve Hicken has an excellent series of posts on the occasion of the big centenary; Molly Sheridan has video from local New York TV. Happy birthday, Mr. Carter!

Update: The Today show has postponed its Birthday Board, so Willard Scott will not ratify Carter's birthday until next week. The Charlie Rose show has put up video of Carter's appearance last night with James Levine and Daniel Barenboim. And NPR has a lovely profile with many extras in the sidebar.

According to a Boosey & Hawkes press release, Elliott Carter's hundredth birthday will be proclaimed by Willard Scott on NBC's Today show on December 12. (For overseas readers: Today is a popular American morning TV program on which Scott, a former weatherman, regularly pops up to congratulate centenarians.) Check out this picture of the ever-robust Mr. Carter in Boston a few days ago; it accompanies an excellent Matthew Guerrieri interview. The New York Philharmonic joins the festivities with a Day of Carter on Saturday ($25/$12).

The point is often made that "modern music" (say, strongly dissonant music or atonal music) has entered the mainstream through movies and TV. Michael Monroe provides a brilliant illustration in his post Webern in Mayberry. See also 12-Tony.

Tonight in London I happily and gratefully received the Guardian First Book Award. Deepest thanks to the Guardian jury for bestowing this honor and also to broad-minded readers' groups from the Waterstones chain for voting The Rest Is Noise onto the shortlist. Hors d'oeuvres at the ceremony were handed out on serving trays containing copies of the shortlisted books; hence the photo in the corner. I'll be able to catch one concert during this very brief trip to London; tomorrow night at Wigmore Hall, Steven Isserlis and Thomas Adès play a program of Debussy, Janáček, Fauré, Kurtág, Ravel, and Poulenc. By the way, if you are new to this site, you can here find an Audio Guide to twentieth-century music and also a glossary of wacky musical terms.

Update: Colin Greenwood, my illustrious guest at the event, says blushingly nice things about the book to Claire Armitstead.

With the centenary of Olivier Messiaen drawing nigh, here are some additions to my Messiaen 100 post of some weeks back. First, the DG label is releasing a mammoth, thirty-two-CD Complete Edition of the Maître's works, with authoritative performances by the likes of Olivier Latry, Roger Muraro, Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung, and Kent Nagano (his great recording of Saint François d'Assise). Also, I earlier neglected to mention that the Cleveland Museum of Art is offering a strong cluster of events over the next several weeks: the Quartet for the End of Time twice, Christopher Taylor playing Vingt Regards on the night of the birthday (Dec. 10), and From the Canyons to the Stars with Oberlin players on Dec. 13. Note also ongoing observances at Jacaranda in LA; Mark Robson will do the Vingt Regards on Dec. 6. Matthew Odell plays the same huge work at An Die Musik in Baltimore on Dec. 7. Up in New Haven there's a series called Messiaen at Yale, with Paul Jacobs undertaking Livre du Saint Sacrament, the composer's final organ masterpiece, on the 10th. Here in NYC we'll have a Quartet in the Music at Our Saviour's Atonement series in Washington Heights on Dec. 7; the same work at NYU's Mission Française on Dec. 10; a Voices of Ascension concert the same night at the Church of the Ascension in the Village, with yet another Quartet and Jon Gillock playing organ selections; a Miller Theatre tribute with AXIOM on Dec. 13; and Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Turangalîla with Yale players at Carnegie on Dec. 14 ($10-25). But nothing on this continent beats the climax of Automne Messiaen in Montreal: the entire organ output during the day of Dec. 10, plus Vingt Regards that night and a Nagano-directed Saint Francis on birthday eve. See the master event list for Messiaen events around the world. The day after, of course, Elliott Carter turns one hundred; James Levine leads the celebration at Carnegie, with a Making Music event the following night. At Southbank in London, the unstoppable Boulez will lead a Messiaen concert on Dec. 10 and a Carter concert on Dec. 11, including something of his own on each night for the sake of variety — or, perhaps, continuity.

Any performance of Morton Feldman's mysterious and sublime Rothko Chapel is an event. Musica Sacra will present the work tonight at 7PM at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, as part of WNYC's New Sounds Live series. Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater is also on the program. Admission is free.

Audio: 1) Philip Brett conducting the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; with David Abel, viola, Karen Rosenak, celesta, and William Winant, percussion; New Albion NA039. By kind permission of New Albion. 2) The final minutes of my Feldman tribute on WHRB-FM, Dec. 17, 1989, with Magnus Lindberg's Kraft as the signature tune.

Carnegie Hall's Leonard Bernstein festival is heading into its final weeks: On the Town has a short run at City Center starting on Wednesday night, and Alan Gilbert conducts the Juilliard Orchestra in the Kaddish Symphony on Nov. 24. American Scholar offers a nice bit of Bernsteiniana online: an account of a memorable appearance that Bernstein made at Harvard in 1986, with Gilbert as his student presenter. Two others who helped to organize Bernstein's late-night soliloquy at Adams House were James Ross, then a music tutor and now on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Music; and Robert Kiely, beloved master of the house. Kiely recalls that Bernstein gave his speech while puffing on a cigarette and sipping Scotch from a dining-hall glass. His topic was terrorism.

Marin Alsop, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, will speak at the National Press Club tomorrow (Monday) at 1PM; there will be a live broadcast on C-SPAN. A press release promises that Alsop will "challenge business, philanthropic and arts leaders throughout the nation to stimulate a collaborative movement that leverages arts-based education programs to encourage positive social change in our communities." Read here about Alsop's OrchKids initiative in Baltimore.

Fulfilling hints by Andrew Patner and La Cieca in recent months, Gerard Mortier has withdrawn from New York City Opera. Mortier had set forth a remarkable plan for an all-twentieth-century opening season, but adequate funding failed to materialize, and Mortier walked out. What happens next for City Opera is anything but clear. Dark days may lie ahead for many artistic institutions; as Tim Mangan reported three days ago, Opera Pacific is shutting down, and, according to Mark Swed, the Pasadena Symphony is in trouble. This will hardly be the end of it. Sympathies to all those who are losing their jobs in difficult times.

The last time I heard spontaneous singing in Union Square was in the days after September 11, 2001 — an experience I wrote about here. The crowd on Tuesday night consisted largely of college students and people in their twenties; some were children when 9/11 happened. I doubt that many members of this exuberant throng were thinking about what happened in this city seven years ago, but, for various reasons, I certainly was. The young man in the foreground is holding up a rush edition of the Daily News: President Obama.

The LA Philharmonic has set up a sumptuous website
in celebration of Esa-Pekka Salonen's final season as the orchestra's
music director. The audio portion of the site has some fifteen hours of
free music, emphasizing such Salonen specialties as Debussy, Sibelius,
Stravinsky, and Bartók. One noteworthy item: Steven Stucky's brilliant, intensely winning Second Concerto for Orchestra, which has yet to be commercially recorded. (Via ArtsJournal.)

At a meeting with a group of journalists today, Alan Gilbert, the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, divulged some details of his first season, which gets underway next fall. Also in attendance were Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic's president, and Matías Tarnopolsky, the artistic administrator, both seconding Gilbert's commitment to combining traditional repertory with contemporary work — what the conductor calls a "museum plus laboratory" approach. The orchestra is not yet ready to announce the entire season, but Gilbert did describe his opening-night gala program: a new piece by Magnus Lindberg, Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi with Renée Fleming as soloist, and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Lindberg — pictured above — will be the Philharmonic's composer-in-residence, a position that lasts two years. The Finn will write another new work for Gilbert's opening season and also direct one of two programs by the Philharmonic's new-music ensemble, which commences operations next season. Lindberg and Gilbert are looking at a long list of potential composers for commissions, including a number of little-known younger Americans. Other items of interest: Valery Gergiev will lead a three-week Stravinsky festival in spring 2010; Thomas Hampson will serve as Artist in Residence, curating several programs; and, in a sign of his commitment to the city, Gilbert will lead all of the Philharmonic's summer parks concerts. Overall, the feeling was good. Dan Wakin has more.

An excerpt from Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, with Kari Kriikku, clarinet, and Sakari Oramo conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony; Ondine 1038.